While triple Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt waits to see if he will be named the 2008 World Sportsman of the Year, he has been named Track and Field News' Male Athlete of the Year.

Track and Field News is widely considered the Bible of track and field.

Bolt, who the magazine describes as the 'Jamaican Jet', became only the third man in the 50-year history of the magazine's Athlete of the Year choices to receive a perfect score from its international panel.

The feat was previously achieved by Kenya's Henry Rono in 1978 and Texan Michael Johnson in 1996.

Eighteen athletes received votes with Bolt amassing the maximum 380 points, followed by Kenya's distance champion Kenenisa Bekele with 330 points and Cuba's record-breaking sprint hurdler, Dayron Robles, third with 313 points.

Jamaica's former 100-metre world record holder, Asafa Powell, was 18th with one point.

On the women's side, Ethiopian distance queen Tirunesh Dibaba was named Track and Field News' Female Athlete of the Year. She topped the voting with 96.2 points ahead of Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva and Kenyan 800-metre sensation Pamela Jelimo.

Jamaica's Olympic 400-metre hurdles gold medalist and record holder, Melaine Walker, finished sixth in the voting, ahead of two-time Olympic 200-metre champion Veronica Campbell Brown, who was eighth.In addition to his three gold medals at the Beijing Games in August, Bolt has won many awards since his conquests in China, including the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) Male Athlete of the Year and the BBC's Overseas Sports Personality of the Year.

Bolt finished second in the voting for the magazine Sports Illustrated Athlete of the Year behind American swimmer Michael Phelps, who won a record eight gold medals in Beijing.

However, Michael Johnson, the man whose record Bolt broke when he won the 200-metre sprint in Beijing in 19.30 seconds, believes Bolt should have won the award.

He argues that swimming records are broken more frequently, while his 200-metre world record had stood for 12 years and many pundits had believed it would have stood for much longer had it not been for Bolt. He also argues that swimmers get to participate in many more events than sprinters do.

Bolt has been shortlisted for the Sports Man of the Year Award along with Phelps, golfer Tiger Woods, basketball great Kobe Bryant, tennis greats Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal and New York Giant quarterback Eli Manning among others. Phelps is seen as Bolt's greatest challenger for the award.